The present invention relates to the field of prototype development and to the field of circuits and backplanes. More particularly, the present invention relates to prototyping circuits and backplanes by constructing a reusable and modular assembly providing improvements in cost, time, and reliability.
Before an electronic product having electronic components and circuit boards is set for mass production, considerable time and resources are expended during the prototype development phase (or prototyping) in demonstrating the operational feasibility of the electronic product. In this early stage of development, the electronic product is assembled in a manner facilitating verification, debugging, and evaluation of the functionality of the electronic product without regard or with a lesser regard for mass production considerations. This assembly which is accomplished for convenience purposes is known as breadboarding. In general, the electronic product undergoes extensive modification and reengineering in the course of the breadboarding process aimed to building a prototype of the electronic product which meets the engineering and product specifications assigned to the electronic product.
Typically, an electronic product that requires extensive breadboarding during the prototype development phase (or prototyping) is a backplane. In general, a backplane is a circuit board, usually implemented as a printed circuit board, which supports other circuit boards, including printed circuit boards, and electronic components by providing an assembly platform and providing interconnections among the other circuit boards and electronic components through one or more buses, usually including data, signaling, power, and ground buses. There are numerous types of backplanes, each suited for one or more applications. For example, particular backplanes specialize in handling analog signals, digital signals, or both analog and digital signals. In addition, some backplanes specialize in high speed data transmission. Backplanes vary in size and shape, properties which tend to depend on the particular application for which the backplane is designed.
Moreover, backplanes can be described as being either active or passive. Active backplanes include, in addition to receptacles for receiving a circuit board, logical circuitry that performs computing functions. In contrast, passive backplanes have almost no logic circuitry. More importantly, passive backplanes make it easier to repair faulty electronic components and to upgrade to new electronic components.
In prototyping a backplane, any one of several conventional techniques is utilized. Occasionally, multiple circuit boards are hard-wired directly to one another. Sometimes, a previously designed backplane is reused after being moderately or extensively modified.
More commonly, a custom backplane is designed and manufactured or a wire-wrap backplane is built during the process of prototyping a backplane.
Constructing a custom backplane is a slow and expensive procedure. Delay in verifying, debugging, and evaluating the custom backplane because of the time spent on designing and manufacturing the custom backplane impedes the product development process. Since the custom backplane undergoes many changes during the prototyping stage, several custom backplanes need to be designed and manufactured over the course of the prototyping stage, thus amplifying the costs in time and resources.
Similarly, building a wire-wrap backplane from a wire-wrap board has been a traditional way of prototyping a backplane. This point-to-point wiring technique demands considerable time and patience in appropriately connecting a plurality of wire-wrap pins with wire-wrap wire. One additional attribute of a wire-wrap backplane lies in its high susceptibility to errors during its construction. In particular, errors can arise from having a defective wire-wrap wire connecting any one of the wire-wrap pills or from establishing a wire-wrap connection between the wrong wire-wrap pins. Lastly, the wire-wrap backplane is not well suited for reuse in a different backplane application.
What is needed is a reusable and modular assembly for prototyping circuits and backplanes effectuating reductions in costs, time, and construction errors.
The process of prototyping circuits such as a backplane or a circuit board has been modularized for achieving marked reductions in costs, time, and construction errors. Rather than repeating the recurring tasks of the prototyping process, such as making bus connections between different circuit boards, the present invention implements a plurality of modules which can be separably coupled into an assembly having a planar arrangement for prototyping circuits, where each module specializes in a particular task. In the preferred embodiment, the plurality of modules includes a data bus module, a switchable data bus module, a power bus module, and a wire-wrap module. Each one of the plurality of modules includes a coupling face configured for coupling to one or more circuit boards.
Since the assembly is constructed by simply coupling one or more modules to one another, the present invention facilitates rapid and cost-effective prototyping of a variety of backplanes as well as facilitates reuse of the assembly in multiple prototyping processes by simply separating the one or more modules from one another. Moreover, the bus modules are internally configured to couple one or more circuit boards together, thus substantially lowering the need for wire-wrapping. Hence, the construction errors associated with wire-wrapping are substantially reduced, leading to quality improvements.